Solved Vista running on an HP Pavillion laptop 15-cd0xx

[elton-77]

Hi guys.

My very old Acer laptop is running Vista. The only program I use on it is Sonicstage by Sony. This is the only software that can update my ancient but perfectly servicable Sony mp3 player. Regrettably, Sonicstage will not run on any other Windows OS. There are work arounds but alas, they all have serious flaws. So the Acer is used soley for this purpose.

Today, I went to use it and it appears to have a keyboard fault where every open screen is just scrolling [almost as if a key is permanently pressed]. So much so you cannot use it. The laptop is pretty wrecked and was salvaged from the tip in honesty so I am reluctant to invest any money in it for a new keyboard!

I have an HP Pavillion laptop stored that currently has Windows 10 installed. It is not used for anything, So my cunning plan was, let's install Vista on it and just have that as my Sonicstage platform. Is this feasible? Could I swap over the hdds for instance? Would the HP run Vista? Not sure I want to wipe clean the Win10 installation and struggle getting Vista on only to find out from the experts here that the task is impossible.

Would welcome your views people.

 

[Vistaar]

I have an HP Pavillion laptop stored that currently has Windows 10 installed. It is not used for anything, So my cunning plan was, let's install Vista on it and just have that as my Sonicstage platform. Is this feasible? Could I swap over the hdds for instance? Would the HP run Vista? Not sure I want to wipe clean the Win10 installation and struggle getting Vista on only to find out from the experts here that the task is impossible.

Welcome back to Vista Forums elton-77! I wasn’t even a member yet the last time you posted.

It depends partly on whether you wish to install Vista x64 or x86, and the CPU of the HP Pavillion. Vista x64 has known issues with Intel processors that have Haswell or newer microarchitecture, but Vista x86 does not. (I’m not very familiar with AMD processors, but let us know if you have one.) USB 3.0 ports might also make matters a little difficult, but I think solutions for that have been found.

 

[elton-77]

Vistaar ... it's been a while since I had any issues with Vista or PC's in general. Thank you for replying.

I discovered this morning that it was the '6' key that was stuck and therefore giving a few issues with scrolling etc. Having now 'freed' the errant key the laptop is working but SonicStage does seem to suck the life out of it!

The newer HP Pavillion laptop is an AMD A9-9420 RADEON R5 5 COMPUTE CORE 2C +3G 3GHz with 8GB RAM.
It's a 64 bit X64 basic processor.

Experimenting with my Win10 desktop last night I did manage to get SonicStage running of a fashion. My intention is to experiment some more and if I can get it working in a reasonable fashion I would be happy to stick with that. But the juries out atm.

 

[lmacri]

Hi elton-77:

Have you tried installing SonicStage 3.4 on your Win 10 computer and then running it in Compatibility Mode for an older OS like Win XP SP3 or Vista SP2? See the Laptop Mag article How to Set Compatibility Mode for Apps in Windows 10 for more information.

If SonicStage does not run correctly on your Win 10 machine then right-click the desktop shortcut, choose Properties, and change the compatibility mode of the desktop shortcut on the Compatibility tab to an older operating system to see if that helps.



Note the screenshot above is just for illustration. I originally used a paid version of Microsoft Money on my Vista SP2 machine but this software was discontinued by Microsoft many years ago. When I purchased my Win 10 machine I installed Microsoft's free Money Plus Sunset Deluxe and it ran fine on my Win 10 machine and imported my old .mny file without changing the compatibility mode or making any other tweaks, even though the system requirements say this unsupported Money Plus Sunset Deluxe is only compatible with Win XP, Vista and Win 7.

 

[elton-77]

Thanks Imacri ... tried the compatibility modes but it doesn't like any of them.

But, I've had success today on my Windows 10 laptop. Installed SonicStage ... had a few errors but ignored them.
Imported my music files and no issues whatsoever. Attached the player and instant error advising I must format the mp3 drive ... no chance of that happening! The player is a Sony NW-HD5H 20GB model with hdd. Ignored the error & warning and tried transferring new music tracks across ... once again a few errors stating it cannot do it, but it did do it. Furthermore, they were converted from mp3 to Atrac files and all was well.
Thorough testing of adding and deleting files from the laptop and player [via SonicStage] have all succeeded.
The only issue is transferring files from the player to the laptop and I'd never want to do that anyway.

So for now, I'm happy. The old Acer Vista laptop can take up residency at the recycling centre once I've stripped it of parts that may be useful.

Thanks for your replies